Biography

Dean, William Frishe (Bill) [MajGen CG 24thID]

The
24th Division was commanded by a "can do" general,
William F. Dean, who seemed
ideally suited for the frenetic job at hand. At age fifty Dean was the youngest
of the four division commanders in Eighth Army and the only one who had
commanded troops in combat. He was also the only one of the four who knew South
Korea well.[4-8]

Born in Carlyle, Illinois, in 1899, Dean was a big
(six-foot, 210pound), bluff field general, a fighter and an impressive leader.
From his high school days Dean had set his sights on West Point, but he had not
been able to get an appointment. Determined to make the Army a career, Dean
enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in a prelaw course and
joined the ROTC. A mediocre student, Dean was graduated after five years (1922)
minus a law degree, but he obtained an ROTC commission (1923) and went on
permanent active duty. He married Mildred Dern, niece of wealthy Utah
politician George H. Dern, who was a U.S. senator, then governor, then Franklin
D. Roosevelt's secretary of war from 1933 until his death in 1936. The Deans had
two children, June (who married an Air Force officer, Robert Williams) and
William, Jr., who was preparing to enter West Point with the class of 1954.[4-9]

Perhaps assisted by his uncle-in-law's high
positions, Dean climbed the peacetime Army career ladder steadily, attending
both the Command and General Staff School and the Army War College (1940). But
when World War II commenced, he was stuck for all too long in various desk
jobs. Finally, in late 1943, he was promoted to brigadier general and assigned
to the ETO-bound 44th Infantry Division as assistant commander. An act of
bravery during a training exercise nearly denied him combat. When a
flamethrower hose broke loose and engulfed the operator in fire, Dean leaped to
rescue the operator and, in the process, was himself so badly burned that
doctors declared his left leg would have to be amputated. Hearing this, Dean
"went AWOL" from the hospital, sailed for France, rejoined his
division, and limped into battle
in late 1944 with a hawthorn cane. The 44th Division surgeon kept Dean going;
the leg did not fully heal until after the war.[4-10]

Dean was thoroughly competent and apparently fearless
on the battlefield. Early in the action he won a DSC for personally leading a
platoon through a withering German artillery barrage. When the division
commander was wounded and invalided home, the corps commander, Ham Haislip,
promoted Bill Dean (then forty-five years old) to the top job. In tough fighting
near Mannheim and Heidelberg, during which his hair turned from blond to white,
Dean led the division well. After Germany had surrendered, the division was
selected for the invasion of Japan, but the Japanese surrendered before it set
sail for the Pacific.[4-11]

In the postwar years Dean, by then a
two-star general
with a promising future, was assigned to duty with American occupation forces
in South Korea. He served as a deputy commander to
John Hodge until
August
1948, when the occupation command was dissolved and Hodge went home. Thereafter
Dean was made commander of the 7th Infantry Division and as such withdrew it to
Sapporo, on Hokkaido, Japan. From May to October 1949 he put in a tour on
Walker's Eighth Army staff but hated every minute of it. When a "sudden
transfer" left the 24th Division without a commander, Dean talked Walker
into giving him the job.

Dean's
one year tour in South Korea, he later wrote,
had been "interesting and troubling." Wearing several
"hats," he had been the senior American adviser to the police and
constabulary, along with other jobs. He had traveled widely in South Korea,
picked up a "few words" of the Korean language, observed at close
hand the Byzantine political scene, and got to know
Rhee and other governmental
and military figures. However, he had no love for the place. He did not want - or
expect - ever to return to South Korea and was as surprised as everybody else
when the war alert reached his 24th Division headquarters in Kokura.[4-12]

Notwithstanding his rank and bright future in the
Army, Dean remained unpretentious and a touch self-deprecating. An aide
remembered that whenever possible and practical, Dean preferred to walk rather
than ride in staff cars (the local Japanese nicknamed him Aruku Shoko, or
Walking General). He had "no hang-ups about status," the aide
remembered. He was "his own best shoe shiner." "Always much more
of a doer than a talker," the aide recalled, Dean was at root a simple,
down-to-earth soldier who saw most issues in blacks and whites and was put off by
"hypocrisy" and "self-proclaimed paragons of virtue who kicked
their dogs when they thought no one was looking.[4-13]

Major General William Dean, the commander of the 24th
Infantry Division, received the Medal of Honor for his valor in combat
just a few weeks after the Battle of Osan. This was the first Medal of
Honor to be received for valor in the Korean War. On
July 20, 1950,
General Dean, alone, attacked an enemy tank while armed only with his
sidearm and a hand grenade. He further directed the fire of his own tanks
from an exposed position while under artillery and small arms fire. Despite
his valor and those with whom he fought, the town he hoped to defend,
Taejon, was overrun. He ordered his men to retreat but he refused to depart
with the leading elements. He remained behind to organize his retreating
units and provide directions to stragglers. He was last seen assisting
wounded to safety. As his forces dropped back, he became separated from them.
He hid alone in the woods around the countryside during the day and

traveled at night for over a month. On August 25, 1950 he
was captured by the North Koreans after hand-to-hand fighting. He remained
a POW until his release on September 4, 1953. General Dean's whereabouts were
unknown until December 18, 1951, when
Wilfred Burchett interviewed him in
prison. This was the first time anyone knew he was alive since being
reported missing in action. In addition to receiving the Medal of Honor, at
his retirement on October 31, 1955, he was awarded the Combat Infantry
Badge for his front line service in WWII and Korea, an award he particularly
cherished.

At his retirement, General Dean said this: "If the story of my
Korean experience is worth telling, the value lies in its oddity, not in
anything brilliant or heroic. "There were heroes in Korea, but I was not
one of them. There were brilliant commanders, but I was a general captured
because he took a wrong road. I am an Infantry officer and presumably was
fitted for my fighting job. "I don't want to alibi that job, but a couple of
things about it should be made clear. In the fighting I made some mistakes
and I've kicked myself a thousand times for them. I lost ground I should not
have lost. I lost trained officers and fine men. I'm not proud of that
record, and I'm under no delusions that my weeks of command constituted any
masterly campaign. "No man honestly can be ashamed of the Medal of Honor.
For it and for the welcome given to me here at home in 1953, I am humbly
grateful. But I come close to shame when I think about the men who did better
jobs some who died doing them and did not get recognition. I wouldn't have
awarded myself a wooden star for what I did as a commander. "Later, as
fugitive and prisoner, I did things mildly out of the ordinary only at those
times when I was excited and not thinking entirely straight; and the only
thing I did which mattered to my family and perhaps a few others was to
stay alive. Other prisoners resisted torture, but I wasn't tortured. Others
hid in the hills and finally escaped, but I failed in my escape attempts.
Others bluffed the Communists steadily, whereas I was lucky enough to do
it only once in a while.

"Others starved, but I was fed and even learned to like
Kimchee. Others died for a principle, but I failed in a suicide attempt.
"My life was an adventure, I did see the face of the enemy close up. I did
have time to study his weaknesses and his remarkable strengths, not on the
battlefield but far behind his lines. I saw communism working with men and
women of high education or none, great intelligence or little and it was a
frightening thing. "I ought to know. I swatted 40,671 flies in three years
and counted every carcass. There were periods when I was batting .850 and
deserved to make the big leagues."

General Dean passed on August 25, 1981. He
is buried at the Presidio of San Francisco, with his wife.